Metadata and SEO can often seem trivial for busy companies and creators with high video volume on YouTube, especially when content is a top priority. Quality content is certainly the most important part about driving viewership, but how that content is packaged and categorized cannot be overlooked.
60% of all viewership on YouTube comes from search and suggestions which means the majority of viewership is algorithm driven. This is especially true in the first 2 weeks of your video being live, as YouTube uses video metadata to learn about the content. Metadata and categorizing content can be time consuming, but YouTube has built some powerful features to speed up this process that channels often miss. Here are a few of our favorites.
Upload Defaults
Manually adding video metadata like titles, tags and descriptions can be one of the most time consuming parts of publishing videos on YouTube. It’s worth the effort because this metadata is the first thing YouTube’s algorithm uses when learning about how to surface your video in search. There’s a faster way to get all of this great information to your videos by using your channel’s Upload Defaults.
You’ll find Upload Defaults under the Channel section of your Creator Studio, where you can edit these settings. The information you enter here will automatically be preloaded into every video you upload from that point forward. Of course, each video on your channel will be a little different and require unique metadata, but most videos will share at least some common information. For example, a record label would want to include the label name, genre, sub-genres and location for all videos. The same goes for parts of the description like social links and links to other videos. We like to suggest coming up with a template that works well for you and then just swapping out the information that’s unique to each video. Here’s our recommended description and tag template to get you started:
Description Template
Official music video for {SONG} by {ARTIST} off their album, {ALBUM}.
Buy {ALBUM}: {PURCHASE PAGE URL}
Follow {ARTIST} on Spotify: {SPOTIFY URL}
Visit the {ARTIST} Channel: {CHANNEL URL}
Connect on Social:
Facebook: {FACEBOOK URL}
Instagram: {INSTAGRAM URL}
Twitter: {FACEBOOK URL}
More From {ARTIST}:
{VIDEO 1 TITLE}: {VIDEO 1 URL}
{VIDEO 2 TITLE}: {VIDEO 2 URL}
{VIDEO 3 TITLE}: {VIDEO 3 URL}
5 Essential Tags
Artist, Song, Album, Label, Genre
Supplemental Tags
Key lyrics, visual content, song topic, key band members, artist hometown, director, producer, notable actors, etc.
Branding Watermark
Don’t underestimate the importance of building your subscriber base. Videos are most often found in search or browse features on YouTube so not all fans will actually see your channel page where the subscribe button lives. In order to expose this call-to-action more, add a Branding Watermark to your videos under the Channel section of your Creator Studio. You can include any image you’d like (usually a logo) and YouTube will add this as an annotation overlay to the bottom right of all your videos. It instantly adds an official feel and acts as a subscribe button to hook interested viewers while they’re engaged with your content.
Featured Content
If you have one video that you’d like to promote across your whole channel, you can do that in a matter of seconds using Featured Content. Visit the Featured Content section of your channel and set the video URL that you’d like to promote. This will show as an annotation across all other videos on your channel, prompting fans to check it out. As priorities change, all you need to do is swap in a new video URL and it’ll update the entire promotion.
Auto-Add Playlists
By far the most overlooked and underutilized feature is that Auto-add feature on video playlists. We’ve posted about this in the past and it deserves another mention here. As a best practice, you should be creating and updating playlists for your channel regularly. For channels that upload frequently, it can be a daunting task to upload each playlist as new videos are published. If you set up your playlists with Auto-add rules, you can completely automate your playlist curation by simply uploading new videos. Read our earlier post on this to learn more.
We hope these YouTube channel performance-boosting tips will help make your life a little easier, and your subscribers, more plentiful.
